


light through the blue at the edges of the ice

by Nemonus



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 08:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12678087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Aloy sent a marker to Sylens’ Focus as soon as she left the mountain. 'Just in case,' she thought, and 'please,' and 'if you were so eager to speak to me the second I jammed my boot against the craggy rock of the place you called south-of-home, maybe I’m not the one who’s pining.'Post-Frozen Wilds hurt/cold comfort. This is exactly what you think it is.





	light through the blue at the edges of the ice

Aloy sent a marker to Sylens’ Focus as soon as she left Ourea’s mountain. Just in case, she thought, and _please_ , and _if you were so eager to speak to me the second I jammed my boot against the craggy rock of the place you called south-of-home, maybe I’m not the one who’s pining._

She chose a place just over the border of the Cut, where the river ran warm enough to hitch the breath. War wreckage, she thought a moment after remarking that the place was unusually pretty. This wasn’t untouched land; it was land that was tending its scars. One front or the other had left Banuk spears and Carja helmets buried in the ice. She picked her way carefully around them as she moved down to the water. With the war still going on in rivalries and prejudices above the snow line, Aloy knew that the lesson of the land was easy enough to learn but harder to enact. The ground hid fire and strange forces still.

However, she could also read the forest, and as long as the birds kept chirping she did not think any stalking thing, human or machine, would find her in the sheltered ravine without her knowledge. 

Blue light — GAIA’s light, or CYAN’s lesser hue — stood out among the brown branches and white snow. When she saw the pattern she recognized and heard the crunch of a strider’s feet she turned back to the river, pretending not to notice. 

“I thought I would be cold forever,” she muttered, as if to herself. The air prickled with cold.

Someone had left a Carja-style camp chair here, too. One leg was broken, but she could prop the side against a rock and take her ease in reasonable comfort. She tested the balance and sat, wrapping her fur blanket around herself and staring out at the steaming river while she waited and listened to the sounds in the forest. 

“That happens.” His voice shocked through her, but she tamped her reaction down. So, he _had_ shown up. Triumph sat warm in her stomach. She could hear Sylens moving around in the camp behind her. Something about the fact that she was so used to hearing his voice in her Focus made her reluctant to turn around. Yes, she would keep him waiting. Yes, she would savor this. Maybe too she did not want to see him yet with eyes that had grown used to the blue cables; maybe she did not want to consider how he had killed and stolen from his own people in service of what he surely thought was a greater cause that made all their customs moot. 

In a way, he had not been wrong. 

So now they were a werak of two, marked by the Focus sign on their ears. And — she resisted the urge to shake her head, to speak, to hum. He was taking his time. 

She had her timing in mind, counted. 

“Did you get used to the cold?” Aloy asked.

The sound of footfalls on the narrow trail became the shush of snow. “I needed to get used to the heat. The Sundom was … a surprise. But that doesn’t matter.” He kicked through heavy drifts to get to her, then kissed the side of her head above her Focus. She felt him grip the back of the chair and reached back to take his hand, then wrap the blanket around both of their hands to the wrist. She had learned how the Banuk give compliments, from Ourea’s grudging comments. Sylens had not learned the more gregarious Nora style of family. Not yet.

“We could be our own werak. GAIA’s hunters, the Focus werak,” Aloy said, still pretending that the cold in her voice matched the air. 

Sylens withdrew from her, walked toward the steaming water with his hands tucked under his arms. Even at the border between Nora and Banuk land it was cold. Funny that they had camped here, between the two cultures to which neither of them quite belonged. The divine daughter and the murderous thief. How romantic. Aloy smirked. 

Sylens muttered something.

“What?” Aloy couldn’t hear him as he spoke down into the water. _That can’t be what I think he said._ The water smelled strongly like rotten eggs, the wind blowing a whiff toward her. Maybe it had addled her. He wouldn’t have murmured it that way otherwise, like he had half-forgotten and was now discovering some new and wondrous meaning. 

He looked over his shoulder. As usual his expression was very serious, bruised skin under his eyes making him look wise and tired. “My blood in your teeth.” 

Oh. He _had_ said _that_. Aloy wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to — this, to lean back and adjust the fur around her throat and look at him with a level gaze she might have stolen from Ourea, and smirk. Now she could speak like she had wanted to, all want and fire. “Not yet.” 

So he shook water off his hands and approached her. So he touched the sides of her face with the warm water and warm skin, and so she kissed the underside of his jaw and nicked his ear with her teeth. Sulphur and copper, and his breath rumbling against her, and now he chuckled and she did too, so it was funny and irreverent again until he pulled back and she met his eyes. 

She had missed him. She had found out such terrible things and been trapped in such small, places, machines collapsing around her, with people to whom she could not explain any of the things she saw in her Focus and to whom she could certainly never explain this man and their understanding. 

She was wise enough in the ways of the world to know that their relationship was hard to define and hard to guarantee. If it was anything, it was this: choice after choice after choice of choosing one another, two people alone in their knowledge. They had one another’s backs — most of the time — and both ex-Banuk and never-quite-Nora could appreciate that. One day she might want someone more reliable, more earthy. For now — 

The cold. They curled together in a tent lashed to the bare ground like the Nora did and held high by cables like the Banuk did. With both of them wearing furs and wrapping themselves in two blankets the tent quickly became more comfortable. He held her and pressed his face against the back of her neck, the blue wires at first cold against her skin and gradually warming. She had not stayed with him for this length of time before, and not with the sense that she did not soon have to leave; it was an extraordinary gift on the scale of GAIA’s forest-covered mountains that she could run her fingers back and forth over the patterns on his arms just to watch the light dim and sharpen. They both shivered, drawing closer to one another until Aloy was not sure where bodies ended and blankets began. She knew she was leaning her head against his shoulder; she knew that his breathing had become even. She wanted to tell him — wanted to thank him, in some way that allowed them both to keep their carefully calculated dignities.

Still tracing her thumb over the places where the wires dipped into his skin, she said, “My blood in your teeth.” 

He grumbled, a huff of sound that conveyed his impatience and approval at once. She squirmed as he withdrew his hand from under hers and touched her shoulder, drawing away the blue-dyed leather of her newest jacket. Cold on her skin for a moment, the memory of snow up to her ankles and clumping in her boots. Sylens bit down on her shoulder, certain and slow, and the warmth and the ache of it raked through her. If she tossed her head she could have hit him in the mouth and laughed again and then the moment would have been ruined, so instead she traced along his jaw with her fingers and curled more tightly into the blankets. She hummed appreciative and content, and heard him echo it.

A werak of two, refusing affection unless it was bloody and cold. That sounded right. That sounded like the night before the Spire had felt, when she had called out for him and he had not answered.

And yet. She blinked her Focus on and projected the map above her, tracing over the corners of the Cut with her fingers. Sylens narrowed his eyes against the light, but when she flicked the map toward the other Focus icon hovering at the edge of her vision he looked up at his own projection. Aloy had added markers from maps she had picked up along the way, turning the map based on GAIA’s data into a more up-to-date tapestry of caches and machine sites. 

“Where are you from?” she murmured.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“They said Ban-Ur was in the north. They said you were from a werak called …”

Sylens gestured impatiently at the northwest, careful not to brush the side of the hologram. “This region. I know if I didn’t tell you, you would just figure it out.” 

“Thank you.” The formality could have come off as stilted, she knew, but they were, somehow giving one another leeway here in the warmest place for miles. 

He replied in kind, the space between the words filled up with a gentle resignation. “You’re welcome.” 

“So I’m not Nora, and you’re not Banuk."

"Both and neither."

To whom was she loyal? How did Aloy show loyalty? Not the way of the Banuk, all sharp ice and politeness garbed in carefully delineated refusal. And not the way of the Nora, with death-seekers exiled for peeking out from under superstition’s wing to seek justice. She was huddling here in a tiny gasp of warmth with the only other person in the world who knew one song of humanity had already come to a discordant close. That might be a kind enough gesture; saving them all. Her next gesture would be more selfish. She gathered blankets up to her face and hooked her legs around Sylens' knees, trying to settle against his taller frame.

Did she want some kind of confession from him? The blue light asks things of us that we cannot give, Ourea had said. For other Banuk it could be different, but Sylens had gone through the tests of the blue light, whether or not he had ever believed. Our inadequacy is sewn into our skin. That sort of thing, werak skill-mongering turned religious aspiration, closing around oneself the idea that the ideal was so far and so close always and at the same time. Had he analyzed her search for GAIA that way? Looking for a girl without a mother and finding ... something else?

Sylens sighed, a crumpled noise of sadness or defeat. He swiped his hologram away. Aloy did the same with hers, enjoyed the angle of her arm and stretched far enough that her fingers almost brushed the top of the tent. Strange for her to be here, warm after the biting cold, folded together like the wires on a strider's neck with the man who almost ended the world. GAIA's chosen and the cult-master behind the Eclipse. Small wonder she considered whether she could kill him here, could cut his throat like Helis had wanted to do to her. The spear he had given her glowed out of the corner of her eye, suffused with soft blue.

Warm blue, for now. Ourea had said that humans could never aspire to be as full of life as the machines, and so took their light for their own.

For now, she would take it. Just for now.

"It doesn't seem possible to forget being that cold," Sylens muttered, and Aloy rolled her eyes at him.

She said. "I know. I thought that for weeks."

He shifted around in turn under the heavy blankets. She turned to let him put his arms around her shoulders, both of their heads bowed into the warmth of their breaths. It was easy, here not to have to think about the future. She found it easy to close her eyes and consider only the cold, only the heat, only the mutual self-interest.

The rest would work itself out in GAIA-blue.


End file.
